Different types of form documents may require a user to provide the same information. For example, electronic form documents such as a loan application, a customer survey, and a purchase order may all require that a user enter a first name, a last name, a street address, and a telephone number. Manually entering such information into different forms may become cumbersome for a user who has to complete a large number of different forms. Furthermore, manually entering such information into different forms may increase the likelihood of data entry errors, such as the user providing inconsistent information in different forms (e.g., misspelling names, transposing numbers, etc.).
Prior solutions for this problem may present disadvantages. For example, websites may apply tags to documents that identify common fields such as names, e-mail addresses, etc. A web browser application can use these tags to auto-fill a field having a given tag based on data that a user has previously entered in a field of previous web documents. Although such a solution may ease the process of completing some form documents, this solution relies on the provider of the document tagging the fields. Furthermore, although such tagged fields may partially automate the process of initially entering data into multiple form documents, subsequent changes to the user's information (e.g., a change in name, address, etc.) require the user to re-open each document and manually update the information in each document.
It is desirable for a document management solution to identify similar fields in different documents and to automatically enter the same information in similar fields.